According to The Wall Street Journal, covering the finally-happening trial between Google and Oracle over the former's use of the latter's Java language as the basis for Android app coding, Ellison dished out that Oracle has for some time tinkered with the thought of entering the mobile space. Among them was a purchase of an existing mobile company, like Palm or BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion. Ellison noted that HP eventually purchased Palm, placing the period of Oracle's interest in late 2009 or early 2010. As for RIM, Ellison stated that the Canadian phone maker was too expensive at the time - RIMM's market cap stood at around $35 billion at the time, today RIMM is valued at around $7 billion (which happens to be right around RIM's 'book value' - cash and investments plus physical assets like buildings, factory equipment, servers, land, etc), still nearly six times what HP was willing to pay for Palm.

How could things have been different under Oracle? It's hard to say - it would have been their first foray into the consumer space (outside of Java, which Oracle purchased from Sun Microsystems in 2010). Would the company have taken a hands-off approach like HP was supposed to, or would the ever-outspoken Larry Ellison have had his way with Palm? If we had to guess, they probably would have taken the quasi-independent subsidiary route that Google appears to be taking with Motorola, but how that might have turned out differently for Palm and webOS, only in the Fringe universe do they have an answer. One thing's for sure: we would have had so much fun with an outspoken and no-nonsense Ellison leading the webOS charge.

Oracle is one of the largest enterprise tech companies out there. They are three times larger than HP, by market cap. They are not a patent troll. Emails show that the original developer of Android told the Google founders that they would have to license Java from Sun/Oracle and they chose not too. Acording to your logic does a company have any rights to protect software it owns?

No way of saying what the outcome would have been, maybe webOS under Oracle would have been very different, maybe refocused on the enterprise market even, maybe it would have been changed in ways we wouldn't have liked, who knows?

With that being said however, I do think Ellison isn't the type to give up just a year into ANYTHING, so I suppose that at least webOS devices would still be in the stores and available from the carriers.

speaking of your prophetic post Derek, I just went back and read the comments from that post. This one caught my eye...

"HP, culturally speaking, would be a terrible fit unless you wanted to completely kill off whatever existed of Palm, and butcher WebOS, then after it was butchered, release it as open source years later once it is irrelevant"

of course you would have to change "years" to "a year"

not everything in those comments were prophetic...there was this....
"Google. I love everything they are doing lately. Anyone else on Google Wave. I'm loving it'

Wow! It would have been so cool to see webOS installed on every [whatever it is oracle makes]. I would have definitely picked one up at [whatever place sells them] just to try it out. This would have been a great smartphone OS for [whatever people buy Oracle stuff].

Here's what the logo would have looked like [Photoshop of whatever the Oracle logo is combined with whatever the webOS logo is].

Larry Ellison couldn't have been any worse than [whoever is to blame for the webOS screwup].

Oracle is an enterprise software company. The main reason why things went so badly for Palm under HP is because they got a new CEO who tried to turn the whole joint into an enterprise software company. So... it really wouldn't have turned out any better.

If they had bought Palm, this whole fight with Google would have taken a new level, and I'm sure regulators and courts would have been a lot harder with Oracle, preceiving them to be anti-competitive. Not to say they aren't now, but with a small webOS app catalog and a huge Android Market/Google Play built on Java, the courts (and the public) would not have been friendly to Oracle at all, and there might have been public backlash.

I don't see any article stating Oracle's statement as to why they did not buy Palm. I saw one stating why they didn't buy RIM: too expensive. No reason why they didn't buy Palm. You've stated facts but not any words from the horses mouth which is what i am interested, Oracle's statements. Regardless if they would have bought RIM but for the cost clearly not being in consumer markets wasn't something holding them back.

Stories like this just reinforce the outside perception that webOS was never as good as we think it is, because unlike other platforms (RIM, Symbian isn't speculating) we keep harping on what we could have been absent of what has happened.

We may be the Boston Red Sox, pre-2004, but we won't change that if we keep looking back.